Pre(r)amble (americ, "Mission Statement")

Over the next 3 years, Erik Hahn and I (joint course directors) are going to develop the most relevant, most practical, and most enjoyable Optix 4 iPeople course that is taught anywhere in Canada, North America, nay, in the whole Universe. Please help us do this. It will make us wealthy (spiritually) and famous, even wealthier and famouser that we already are, and we will shall share small parts of our wealth and fame with you as we see fit.

For a start, your current optics teaching is too little and too fragmented. We're going to change this by scheduling blocks of teaching (3-4 evenings during a single week). Each session would take up to 2 hours and include a practical part. This will come in addition to the Wednesday morning sessions that are already scheduled. Perhaps we can also have food.

The course will be open to anyone. It is compulsory for residents, but OVS students, staff, fellows, ophthalmology research coordinators, technologists, nurses, postdocs, PhD students, and volunteers are all welcome to attend regularly or ad hoc; the more the merrier. We will make arrangements to make each session available as a webconference for those who cannot grace us with their physical presence and who e-mail (southendhfx-opticsmonster@yahoo.co.uk) at least an hour beforehand.

I rely on you to provide us with ideas on what you believe you should be taught during this course, and how you would like to be taught. We will try and accommodate (note: double c, double m) any requests that we agree with, or provide reasonable alternatives such as references to textbooks & websites. It would help a great deal if you give us pointers to material or ideas from elsewhere. We also need feedback on every session – anonymously if you wish, best on this forum. Your comments will help me negotiate support from the Department and the Faculty.

The updated content of the course will be available for download from my server http://myweb.dal.ca/partes/O4iP_22Feb08.pdf. This document will be updated a day or two before each session. This is no more than an outline of what we plan to cover, as an aide-memoire to myself, and will be useless as a revision aid unless you make copious notes. There will be problems and questions for you to work through, as well as pointers to articles and book chapters to review. Please spend some quality time on this before each session.

We will start the first session on Monday Feb 18, 5pm, in the conference room. If all goes well people offsite will be able to join by webconference if you write an e-mail asking for invitation to southendhfx-opticsmonster@yahoo.co.uk. This e-mail will end up in Paul Artes' yahoo account with different formatting to be easy to spot.

We will have pizza + soft drinks (Justin: hospital policy forbids brewski's as well as perfume and guns - I wonder what will be next, perhaps trousers, make-up, or books by de Sade? - we can go for drinks afterwards). The session continues on Wednesday 11am & 5pm, and on Thursday 5pm. We hope that we will covered all the basics by then. Looking forward to seeing you fresh & well-prepared.